Wednesday, November 11, 2009

I FINALLY tried out my YuDu Machine!

For my birthday, over a month ago, my friends and co-workers all chipped in and got me this...

So... I had the day off today and decided to finally take my new Yudu Screen printing machine out of the box! I had high hopes!!

The design I chose is one I made a couple of years ago and have been asked by so many people to have a shirt made with it.

So...I plugged in the machine & printed out my design on the transparency the machine came with. So far so good...

Then, I got the screen wet and attached the sheet of emulsion and stuck it in the little drying drawer. Took it out twenty minutes later & realized I had left the plastic sheet that separates the emulsion sheets on the emulsion! Took off the plastic sheet, re-wet the screen and stuck it back in the drying drawer for the second time. I must have used too much water the second time because it took an hour and a half to dry!!! I was frustrated!

I finally dragged out my blow dryer to finish the job!However when I went to remove the plastic from the emulsion side, a tiny bit was still wet and it tore the emulsion in one little spot. But at this point I was so out of patience I went ahead and burned my image anyway. It actually burned very well.

However, once I rinsed of the emulsion I realized that some of the lines in my design were way to small & they peeled right off and actually ended up tearing some other parts of the design :(

So, really wanted to make shirts tonight, and was sad that I didn't get too...But the experience was not a total loss.Thanks to the handy dandy emulsion remover I was able to clean off the messed up design.

Which means the screen is nice & clean and can be used again for a different design another day...yea! I'm not scared to try again, but next time I will use a cleaner image with LARGER lines!